It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.